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Sept. 2 — A black George Washington University police supervisor who allegedly harassed lesbian
officers must do more than claim his comments were innocent or misinterpreted in order
to challenge his discharge as discriminatory, a federal judge ruled (
Ladson v. George Washington Univ.
, 2016 BL 286722, D.D.C., No. 14-001586, 9/1/16
).

For their federal and Washington, D.C., law race bias claims to survive to trial,
fired employees must call into question an employer’s stated reasons for termination.
The ruling Sept. 1 by Judge Amit P. Mehta of the U.S. District Court for the District
of Columbia provides practitioners with an example of what type of employee evidence
will be insufficient.

The judge agreed with Todd Ladson that courts should treat an employer’s subjective
evaluations of an employee’s behavior “with caution.”

However, there was nothing subjective about the university’s reliance on the testimony
of multiple female officers to discharge Ladson, he found, ruling in GW’s favor on
Ladson’s race bias claims under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the D.C.
Human Rights Act.

The university conducted an investigation during which current and former female officers
alleged that Ladson asked them if they were sexually involved with other female officers,
said he doesn’t “approve of homosexuals” and tried to convince them that they “should
be with men.”

The officers further claimed Ladson’s repeated behavior made it difficult for lesbians
to be accepted at work.

Ladson didn’t rebut the testimony as false, but seemingly argued that what “might
be offensive and harassing to one person” might be “viewed as in perfectly good fun
to someone else,” the judge said.

The university’s “consideration of Plaintiff’s well-documented boorish and crude behavior
is not the kind of ‘subjective consideration’ that is cautioned against by the court,”
Mehta said.

Additionally, Ladson failed to show GW’s investigation was unfair, or that white police
supervisors who engaged in similar misbehavior received more lenient discipline, he
said.

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